Red Hat and AOL

At first I thought the reports of Red Hat and AOL in discussions were a joke. However, I found out otherwise.

I like my friend Andy’s view of the possibility at O’Reilly – chances are this is going to be a mix that won’t favor either open source or technical innovation. AOL may be business savvy (and known to be rather ruthless in this respect), but the company is also a technology killer.

John Robb thinks that AOL should package and distribute Radio as an alternative to .NET. John, apples and oranges. Radio ain’t .NET. And remember what I said about AOL being a technology killer. Radio is Userland’s baby – you sure you want to hand it over to the really, really big BigCo Suits? What’s the price of success?

Two monopolies are not better than one. A world with AOL and Microsoft sharing dominion is no better than Microsoft having dominion alone.